Why Can’t the UK Stop Terror Attacks?

Let’s not make the same mistake here.

The recent series of terrorist incidents in Europe has produced the inevitable finger pointing regarding the ability of the security services to respond and has also reopened the debate over what might be done to prevent the attacks in the first place.

Similar discussions have been going on in the United States for some time, to includeconsideration of the Violent Radicalism and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007 by the House of Representatives. The bill, sponsored by then congresswoman Jane Harman, was fairly toothless, seeking to establish a national commission and study center, but it was strongly criticized for many of its assumptions and definitions, with some critics noting how it might be exploited to enable the prosecution of “thought crimes.” It was passed in the House by a 404 to 6 vote but, fortunately, later died in the Senate.

More recently, congressman Peter Kinghas held hearings on radicalization of Muslim Americans that ran intermittently for nearly two years between 2010 and 2012. As terrorist incidents actually declined in number during that period, there was little desire on the part of Congress to initiate any draconian new legislation in response to the often conflicting “evidence” compiled by King’s House Homeland Security Committee.

It should surprise no one that the Europeans are much more advanced in their creation of anti-terror legislation than is the United States, if only because they have been more often on the receiving end of ideologically motivated violence. Assuming that America might well be arriving tomorrow where Europe is today in counter-terror, it is instructive to look at one of the proactive frameworks currently in place to analyze both its effectiveness and legality.

Britain has experienced three terrorist attacks in three months. The government responsehas been defined by the British Counter-Terrorism and Security Act of 2015, popularly referred to by the acronym “Contest.” Contest consists of four so-called “workstreams”: “Pursue” to physically interdict terrorist attacks; “Protect” to establish physical barriers against terrorist tactics and weapons; “Prepare” to minimize the after-the-fact impact of a terror attack; and “Prevent,” which is a highly aggressive and controversial program to prevent radicalization.

Prevent is the program that has received the most attention. It relies on the so-called conveyor belt theory which postulates that someone who is either alienated or critical of the status quo will inevitably graduate to even more extreme views and eventually cross the line from nonviolence to violence. Those who are identified as vulnerable by Prevent are sometimes entered into a government funded but privately managed counseling program referred to as “Channel,” which has worked with 8,000 mostly young Muslim men in an effort to avoid radicalization.

The problem with evaluating Prevent’s effectiveness is that it is the governmentdoing the assessing. It equates success with the numbers going through the program and it ignores themany critics who note that it has so alienated the Muslim community that it actually creates more new potential militants than it succeeds in deradicalizing. The fundamental issue is that there is no actual model or profile of a terrorist that one can focus on in an effort to prevent radicalization, so the definition of who might be a threat has been continuously broadened lest anyone escape the net. Nearly all of the recent terrorist attacks in Britain were carried out by young men born in Britain who were at least nominally Muslim, but beyond that they had very little in common in terms of education, family and social background or even religiosity. Their belief in a violent solution to what troubled them certainly sets them apart but it is unlikely that the security services would be able to discern that in any event, so their names frequently join the 23,000 others on the British “subjects of interest” potential terrorism database. From a policing point of view, those 23,000 are joined by thousands more names submitted by ordinary Britons as part of the Prevent program, each one of which has to be investigated and either cleared or added to the database.

The British security agencies have inevitably been overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of terror suspects. Surveillance of a suspect is extremely labor intensive, even when assisted by Britain’s extensive CCTV system, which covers large parts of the country’s cities and towns as well as the roads connecting them, so it is safe to assume that very few dangerous individuals are actually being watched at any given time. This asymmetry makes the odds very much in the terrorist’s favor as he can strike anywhere with any kind of weapon while the police must try to protect everywhere.

Due to the public outcry over the recent attacks, the British government is currently undertaking asweeping security review on terrorism. It will likely expand the Prevent program in spite of uncertainty at all levels over whether it is actually working or not. In addition to encouraging citizens to report suspicious behavior, the legislation actually compels institutions that are in any was connected to the government to actively seek out and identify those exhibiting potential terrorist sympathies. That includes, schools, universities, libraries and any government office that deals with the public. The establishing legislation for Prevent defines early warning signs of terrorist sympathies as “vocal or active opposition to fundamental British values, including democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty, and mutual respect and tolerance of different faiths and beliefs.”

Arecent article in the London Review of Books entitled “Don’t go to the doctor,” explores how Prevent sometimes works in practice in an educational environment. Universities and other schools are required to aggressively seek out radicalized students. They have to submit regular reports demonstrating that they are complying with the law to include specific information regarding individual cases and follow-up action to make sure that they are diligently seeking out radicals. In one case cited, an instructor at Oxford, in dealing with a Muslim university student who was struggling with her course work, learned that the woman had gone to see her doctor regarding depression. Due to Prevent, she felt obligated to ask the student whether she was being radicalized.

Similarly, a librarian at a major university was asked by another college to provide a professional reference for a colleague. One of the questions was “Are you completely satisfied that the applicant is not involved in extremism?” Other universities in Britain have stopped allowing Muslim students to use college rooms for gatherings out of fear that the meetings will be used for radicalization. Guest lists for many university sponsored meetings that are open to students must now be provided 48 hours prior to the event for security screening. College authorities are allowed to search the rooms of Muslim students “on suspicion.”

Some might regard Prevent as a relatively innocuous but necessary measure to combat radicalization. I do not agree as any program that focuses on a particular minority while compelling ordinary citizens to report on other ordinary citizens opens the door to many types of abuse. In any event, the U.S. Constitution would seem to make the type of legislation that established Prevent in Britain unimaginable on this side of the Atlantic, but one should not relax too soon as this is the home of the Patriot and the Military Commissions Acts.

Prevent operates on the principle that individuals who are maladjusted will eventually become pathologically so if they are not counseled and convinced to abandon their wicked ways. It neither addresses nor in any way concedes that many of the disaffected that it targets are actually angry for reasons that are at least comprehensible, including what the British government continues to do to fellow Muslims overseas, which is sometimes referred to as “blowback.” End the bombing of Syrians and Iraqis and much of the motivation to bomb in Birmingham just might disappear. Oddly enough, Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn raised that very issue in the recent British electoral campaign, saying that terrorism was often a response to the policies that the government was carrying out in the Middle East. His comment was largely ignored by the British media, but the Labour Party went on to win many more votes than anticipated and Corbyn nearly became Prime Minister. Perhaps the real message on what actually causes terrorism is beginning to get through to the public. Let us hope so.

Philip Giraldi, a former CIA officer, is executive director of the Council for the National Interest.

Thailand should also stop bombing Iraq and Syria. Then Buddhists would not be targeted in Thailand.

“Beheadings, bombings, drive-by shootings, assassinations, extrajudicial killings and vicious assaults have left more than 6300 people dead and at least 11,500 injured in violence that is rarely reported outside of Thailand.”

Then there are the last remaining Hindus and Buddhists in Bangladesh, who have been attacking Iraqis and Syrians, and who really need to stop doing that.

“A Hindu priest has been killed in Bangladesh, in the latest attack by Islamist militants. The body of Ananda Gopal Ganguly, 70, was found in a field near his temple in western Jhenaidah district. His head had been nearly severed from his neck.”

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-36467270
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Elsewhere on this website, there is an article on how the CIA is busy arming Al Qaeda, Al Nusra, Al Capone and Al Bundy in Syria – apparently, every jihadist there is now getting deadly weapons courtesy of the CIA.

I realize that there are a lot of stupid people in the world, but after watching the non-stop clown-show of Trump, Merkel, Blair, Dubya, Juncker, May, Corbyn, and our own CIA, I wonder if mad-cow disease has overcome these people in the Western twilight’s last gleaming.

It is so obvious that pre-emptive warmaking overseas, so arrogantly conducted with a sure sense of military superiority, will produce an asymmetrical counter strategy response. But when continuous war becomes normalized, and in fact actual business as usual, it seems there ensues an almost insurmountable cognitive dissonance. In all probability, Phil Giraldi is correct and the realization is dawning on the public, with more of us connecting the dots. However, the proven lack of accountability of foreign policy to democratic governance, makes it unlikely that will succeed in changing anything. We have seen how quickly, in both 2009 and 2017, promises to voters are disposed of by Deep State, elites and Washington consensus power players.

It’s nice to know Islamic terror in the west is all about unhappy people being radicalized at the local mosque. I guess the destruction of Syria, Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan plus the bombing of the Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, et alia has nothing to do with it. Oh and I forgot 50 years of israeli occupation and land theft in east Jerusalem; clearly that isn’t a radicalizing influence either. We bomb them and they bomb us back; why is that so hard to understand?

How come so few of the so-called media “terrorism experts” are as clear-thinking as Philip Giraldi?

“Many of the disaffected…are actually angry for reasons that are at least comprehensible, including what the British government continues to do to fellow Muslims overseas, which is sometimes referred to as ‘blowback.’ End the bombing of Syrians and Iraqis and much of the motivation to bomb in Birmingham just might disappear…Perhaps the real message on what actually causes terrorism is beginning to get through to the public. Let us hope so.”

“British government continues to do to fellow Muslims overseas, which is sometimes referred to as “blowback.”

Here’s a notion,

stop immigrating people who have not been fully indoctrinated — and by that I mean intensely and to the extreme — that upon arriving on the shore of Great Britain, they are giving up their past affiliations of loyalty — period.

If their goal is citizenship, then that means fealty to a new way of life, a new cultural a new nation. No ifs, ands, buts . . . or what abouts . . . etc.

When worried about domestic radicalization surely there must be a better plan than increasingly marginalizing and isolating the very people you are concerned about self radicalizing. It is amazing to me that a country that has taken so many steps to demean Muslims can’t see how that might lead to terrorism.

The difference between the US and the UK, is that islamic terrorists here have too much competition from the local “disgruntled worker” variety. The UK does not have that, so terrorist attacks stand out like sore thumbs.

How come so few of the so-called media “terrorism experts” are as clear-thinking as Philip Giraldi?

Philip writes: “Many of the disaffected…are actually angry for reasons that are at least comprehensible, including what the British government continues to do to fellow Muslims overseas, which is sometimes referred to as ‘blowback.’ End the bombing of Syrians and Iraqis and much of the motivation to bomb in Birmingham just might disappear…Perhaps the real message on what actually causes terrorism is beginning to get through to the public. Let us hope so.”

Mass Third World immigration causes massive increases in violence, unemployment, welfare dependency, and civil unrest. You cannot successfully address any of these effects until you address the underlying cause.

When you are in a hole that you don’t want to be in, the first order of business is to stop digging.

The Saudis are the source of the terrorist cancer afflicting the world today. The Saudis have more money than God while most of the rest of the Muslim world is poor, dirt poor, particularly in the provinces. and they are Wahhabi religious fundamentalists. Wahhabi fundamentalism, like most fundamentalism, rejects modernity. In the Muslim world the result is that you have a lot of unemployed and unemployable young men people who are unable to compete economically with the Western world. This leaves them young, angry, impoverished, religious zealots without any kind of prospects for success in life.

The Saudi Wahhabi clerics then fund orphanages — madrasas — throughout the Muslim world, which take these young men-without-prospects and indoctrinate them in extremist Islam: the glory of jihad, the rewards of jihad, the religious duty of jihad, all buttressed by the “unassailable” authority of God — Allah — then, when the time comes and the Saudis need “soldiers of Allah”, they gather these young men who have nothing in their heads but religious extremism, give them a gun and a paycheck and a wife-slash-sex slave and send them out to kill for Islam.

The solution to this terrorist cancer originating from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and spreading across the planet, is clear: invade Saudi Arabia and exterminate the core of the Wahhabi sect, then visit the madrasas and “remove” the Wahhabi imams. “Where’s impediment to this straightforward solution?”, you might ask. It is that the Saudis have so much money that they are protected by politicians in the pay of the oil companies and arms dealers, corrupt politicians feeding at the Saudi trough.

We saw it in the Bush family relations with the Saudis. Saw it in the 28 pages of the 911 Commission report documenting the Saudi role in the attacks, pages classified and held back from public view for 14 years.

The US was attacked, and the financiers of the attack were protected by the US govt itself, for money. That’s the corruption and treason in the DC criminal swamp.

“Prevent operates on the principle that individuals who are maladjusted will eventually become pathologically so if they are not counseled and convinced to abandon their wicked ways.”

Isn’t this more or less how Her Majesties government views all her subjects? Perhaps it’s only a matter of time before Muslims in the UK become as apathetic and useless as the natives, thus solving the problem in the long term.

The problem is that there is this assumption that the rights of Muslims is sacred. They take this gift and then use it to assert.

If there were a sea change, if the tilt of the society were so that Muslims were deported at a breakneck pace, if the rest of society were to unify in this, then you would see a change in attitudes. They respect strength. Trump caused a major stir in his “ban all Muslims” comment, and yet the Saudis have treated him better than they treated Obama.

I should also add that even if quote-unquote “good” Muslims were deported, that is itself a good thing. They bring their exposure of the West to these Muslim societies. They create liberalism there.

It’s the american government that has been radicalized. Washington has been radicalized to the extent that it thinks it needs to start wars in countries it doesn’t like, or whose leaders refuse to obey their betters in Washington DC.
Washington has been so radicalized that it even has built hundreds of bases in nearly every country of the world.
Washington has been so radicalized that it sees every other country as enemies or potential enemies.
Washington has been so radicalized that it now thinks it needs to spy not only on americans, but on every person and every government.
Washington has been so radicalized that it has plunged into debt that can never be repaid and for which we, our children, and our grandchildren are burdened by.
Washington has been so radicalized that now its victims are starting to fight back (blowback), but with little success.
Washington has been so radicalized that it refuses to see the that the cause of terrorism around the world has its roots in Washington’s own policies.

Excellent article on the radicalization of people whose ethnic groups are under perpetual attack in the Mideast, as in “perpetual war.” Contrary to Rabiner, it is important to address Muslims because they’re the ones being targeted as potential terrorists with these programs, even though common senses tells one, as Hume had observed, that some people will naturally “sympathize” with victims of injustice who come under attack. When one puts aside ignorance and looks objectively at the history of the Mideast, we can see a gigantic imperial project there by the West beginning during World War I with secret agreements, even going to the point of setting up a separate state for one particular ethnic group to be drawn from Western Europe principally, as a European outpost, as Zionists sold Israel to British officials as. It’s been unrelenting war and despotic military occupation, direct and indirect, of the native people of the Mideast ever since by the West. When military occupation of a much gentler sort was exercised in Boston in 1775, one victimized people went to war against the British Empire, and drew upon the sympathy of their fellow colonized people to revolt, using “terrorist” tactics to begin with.

Where was the discussion about the Saudi funded Wahhabism mosques in the UK?

Doesn’t “vocal or active opposition to fundamental British values, including democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty, and mutual respect and tolerance of different faiths and beliefs.” pretty much describe Wahhabism?

I also point out that considering that all of the violence so far has been from males born in the U.K. that your supposed strategy wouldn’t work.

If you really wanted to fix matters, we’re going to have to institute a curfew on all males between the ages of 18 and 30, right? After all, if we’re looking at the statistics as to who commits most violence, young males end up at the top of the list….

I’m really surprised that Giraldi doesn’t mention the biggest reason the UK can’t “prevent” terrorism: the UK actually SPONSORS terrorism and allows known terrorists to travel freely between the UK and target countries. The Manchester bomber is a prime example.

“at least nominally Muslim”. That comment says it all about this idiotic article. Here’s a clue: Poland has had NO terrorist attacks and Poland has NO Muslims (or extremely few). More Muslims, more terrorist attacks.

There is no way to stop terrorist attacks. Never was. Don’t know if you noticed but home grown terrorists are the ones shooting at our representatives in both countries.

What we should learn from the U.K. Is more about virtue and courage in the defense of our way of life by varying on rather than hyperventilating like prepubescent teens. For the love of God this nation has withstood far more deadly attacks of political violence and stood… and all this talk like this is something new and scary because it is coming in part from the Muslim world is simply shameful. That conservative are print their pants about this as they do makes me feel bad about the state of conservatives. At least the anti-gun lobby (which I oppose) can pint to some significant losses of innocent life…. christ. What a bunch of opportunistic cowards we conservatives have become.

I guess the destruction of Syria, Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan plus the bombing of the Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, et alia has nothing to do with it. Oh and I forgot 50 years of israeli occupation and land theft in east Jerusalem; clearly that isn’t a radicalizing influence either. We bomb them and they bomb us back; why is that so hard to understand?

After every Islamic terrorist outrage in the West, we are told by Muslims and left-wing Islamo-panderers that the Muslim community cannot be held responsible for these attacks and that it is completely unacceptable for us to even limit Islamic immigration, let alone start killing Muslims in the streets of NYC or London in retaliation.

The British girls in Manchester attending an Ariana Grande concert were not bombing Iraq and Syria, nor have they “stolen” land from anyone. Yet here you are, justifying their murders by linking them to the actions of other Western people in Israel and Iraq.

Be careful what you wish for.

If all people in the West – including little children – bear responsibility for what is happening in Iraq or Afghanistan, we will use the same standard and hold all Muslims responsible for the actions of your fellow Muslims not just in the West but in Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nigeria, and other countries where Hindus, Buddhists, Bahaii, Yazidi, Christians and others are being slaughtered, ethnically cleansed, forcibly converted, and sexually enslaved by the millions by Muslims in the name of your religion and following the example of your “prophet.”

“I also point out that considering that all of the violence so far has been from males born in the U.K. that your supposed strategy wouldn’t work.

If you really wanted to fix matters, we’re going to have to institute a curfew on all males between the ages of 18 and 30, right? After all, if we’re looking at the statistics as to who commits most violence, young males end up at the top of the list….”

excuse the late response here. While there are no guarantees, it would help to indoctrinate students born in the UK from whose parents are immigrants hard long as citizens. Fully embrace them as citizens. Return to traditional course instruction on national history, the good, the bad and the ugly . . .

On immigration no one gets into the state who has not been subject to ridiculously stringent course work as well as background checks. It should be hard to reject your former loyalties to adopt a new one. And that rigor, includes, tests, psychological evals . . . etc. And that would mean religious tests — complete narratives about areas of conflict – enrollee responds.

Then as all citizens, oaths and and pledges, subject to immediate removal from consideration for any violation on their homeland prior to arrival. I take my citizenship seriously – to the point of the ridiculous because so many have paid a dear price to establish it. The mere desire is not enough in my view. Persecution is not enough. One must pay a price. And should that price be so ridiculous they decline to seek it — that is their choice.

There are no guarantees, but that is not cause for taking the matter for granted nor to cause throwing up one’s arms as so many do.

On immigration no one gets into the state who has not been subject to ridiculously stringent course work as well as background checks.

It is not clear why the US even needs immigration at this point. There is a jobs crisis even for native-born, English-speaking blue-collar people. Why do we need to import more Somalis and Yemenis, particularly when automation is consuming jobs like cab-driving?

The Islamo-panderers always tell us how lucky we are that the best and brightest of Somalia or Pakistan want to move to the US, but why is it a good thing to drain those countries of the little talent they have? It used to be called “brain-drain” in the old days before Soros started funding all these leftists and Islam-panderers to push for open borders.